I could go on almost indefinitely, but I have already won the "I can post more links than you"-contest. And all this because of what? Because you are ashamed to shout out you are using Perl? Because we cannot simply state on our CPAN, on Perlmonks (we have hereby already - good), on Foswiki/TWiki/... pages something like "built with the cool Perl programming language"?

Don't like TIOBE? Ok. Try this - shows an equally bad situation for Perl. And you know what? It perfectly correlates with the TIOBE:

Yeah. Sure. All "them is wrong". But we have a community whereas Python has not (I really heard this on the last YAPC and the last 2 Perl workshops. Perhaps you would like to search for "foo community" instead of "foo programming"? You know what? Even THAT correlates.

The numbers on the graph reflect how many searches have been done for a particular term, relative to the total number of searches done on Google over time. They don't represent absolute search volume numbers, because the data is normalized and presented on a scale from 0-100.

Has the total number of searches done on Google from 2004 grown? Has it grown faster than the number of searches for "Perl tutorial"?

These graphs are perfectly consistent with observations on TIOBE - see the respective graphs there (google trends of tutorial searches denote "future interest", while TIOBE denotes "present interest")

If Google trends fall (in absolute numbers - see below), the language popularity will fall. If they remain constant, language popularity will grow. There is a - thin - margin of fall up to which present popularity will remain at least more or less constant. C is a good example for that. If my calculations are correct a factor of 12 in Google trends decrease is the threshold for that situation.

Now to your questions: The normalized Google trends graphs show a decrease by a factor of 25. Which means that we're good if the absolute number of searches on Google has grown 25 times since February 2004. Right?

Of course, i've said that even in my original post that TIOBE is flawed. The intent of the exercise is to rob unscrupulous journalists of a source to be used in decrying Perl's death, or in less nicer words: Get people to shut up, so we can deal with real issues. :)

Edit: Reading your links it seems that the people behind TIOBE even approve of such activities. :D